The Honey Queen (9 page)

Opal’s voice trailed off. She was always trying to stuff Freya with protein in the mornings, while Freya was more of a coffee and a sliver of toast kind of person.

Poor Opal didn’t understand. Apparently, at breakfast every morning the three boys had wolfed down food as if they hadn’t eaten for a week and now she felt that this was the correct way to feed Freya.

Desperate as she was not to hurt her aunt’s feelings, the thought of an egg in the morning turned Freya’s stomach.

She finished her email with a quick:

Reply soonest. We’ll start packing. Mom does tend to overpack but I am assuming this won’t be a problem on the royal plane, right? Hugs,

Cathleen Ni Houlihan

Freya grinned as she clicked
send.

If only she could fly through the Internet like her email and perch on the computer of the man receiving it, to see his astonished face as he read it.

Just outside her window, she could see the blossom on the apple tree in the postage-stamp garden below. Behind the fence her uncle Ned had painted pale green the summer before, the council had started turning a scrap of deserted land into a proper park. The adjacent allotments would stay the way they were, despite the plans for the park, which was wonderful. Uncle Ned would have died if he couldn’t go to his allotment every day. She could see some of the plain but sturdy sheds from the window and the neatly planted allotments themselves. Ned grew tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and all manner of salad greens on his. In the distance Freya could make out the spires and towers of the city, but it seemed a long way away, giving the sense that Redstone was out in the country instead of being part of town.

All in all, Freya felt that the view from the third-floor bedroom of the narrow house more than made up for the tininess of the room.

‘You’re sure it’s not too small?’ Aunt Opal had said anxiously four years ago when Freya had come to live with them. ‘Meredith wouldn’t have this room – she said it was a spiders’ paradise up here in the attic. Mind you, Steve was happy enough in here.’

‘I love it,’ Freya had replied. She wasn’t in the slightest bit scared of spiders for she had spent years taking them gently out of the bath for her mother and releasing them back into the wild. Now the bedroom had a DIY bookcase on one wall, and Freya’s own artwork on another. She’d painted the old wardrobe so it looked like part of Opal and Ned’s colourful garden down below, although Opal didn’t have any enquiring and abnormally large caterpillars on her flowers, or indeed, a Venus fly trap with a shy smile.

Freya checked her watch. Eight o’clock. Time to grab some toast and leave for school.

She clicked off her inbox, unplugged her phone and picked up her schoolbag. This rucksack contained her life, although it hardly looked the part: a greying canvas thing inherited from her cousin David, she’d decorated it with butterflies interspersed with gothic, dangerous-looking faerie creatures, all painstakingly coloured in – often in lessons – with felt-tip pens. She skimmed down the narrow stairs, light on her feet, racing past the second floor where her cousins’ old bedrooms were. Opal and Ned’s bedroom was the biggest, but it was still small compared to Freya’s old home. Not that she cared. Twenty-one St Brigid’s Terrace might be cramped and shabby, but the difference was that in this home she felt loved. Beloved. Something she hadn’t felt for a long time with Mum.

Opal was standing at the cooker in the kitchen that she, Ned and Freya had painted Florida sunshine yellow last Christmas.

‘Too bright?’ Opal had said doubtfully in the paint shop, as the three of them had looked at the colour chart.

Freya hated to see even the faintest hint of worry in her darling Opal’s face.

‘No such thing!’ she reassured her with a hug. ‘Yellow makes people happy, you know.’

And Opal, who would have done anything to make Freya happy, was satisfied.

The tiles on the kitchen splashback were a riot of citrus fruits far too fat to be normal and Opal herself had run up a pair of yellow gingham curtains on her old sewing machine.

‘Freya, love, good morning,’ said Opal now, her face creasing up in a smile as her niece flew into the kitchen. A small, plump woman with a cloud of silvery, highlighted hair, Opal had one of those faces that made everyone want to smile back at her. It didn’t matter that, as she neared sixty, her face was wreathed in wrinkles or that she didn’t walk as fast as she used to because of her arthritis. She was still the same Opal.

Freya had long since decided that her aunt was one of life’s golden people: someone from whom goodness shone like light from a storm lantern on a dark night. Someone who brought the best out in everyone.

‘Morning, Opal,’ Freya said and bent over to give her aunt a kiss on the cheek.

Freya wasn’t tall herself but Opal was really tiny.

Foxglove the cat, a black-and-white scrap that Freya had rescued near the allotments two years ago, sat on the radiator licking her paws. Freya gave her a quick stroke, which Foxglove ignored as usual.

Almost instantly Opal began to fret about Freya’s breakfast. It was a routine that the two of them played out every morning.

‘Look, pet, it’s after eight and you have to get going. You haven’t had a bite to eat or a drink of water, nothing. Honestly, I can’t let you out the door like this. You know they say that young people have to have a proper breakfast in them before they can study. Now I was doing eggs for your Uncle Ned and I can easily pop in a bit of toast and give you some …’

Opal went back to the cooker where she was stirring an ancient saucepan with a wooden spoon. Opal’s scrambled eggs were better than anyone else’s, fluffy clouds glistening with butter. But Freya had neither the time nor the appetite this morning.

‘Sorry, Opal,’ she said, popping a piece of toast out of the toaster, grabbing a knife from the drawer and spreading a hint of butter on it. She took a few bites and set it down on the table without a plate while she filled her water bottle from the tap, then reached into the fridge and snagged the lunchbox she’d packed the night before, stuffing it into her duffel bag. Finally she picked up the toast again. ‘Have to go, Opal, can’t be late.’

Opal sighed the way she did pretty much every morning.

‘Pet, I don’t feel I’m doing my job if you’re not eating properly,’ she began. ‘Your four cousins never left the house without their breakfast – and that includes Meredith and I have to say she was fussy about her food. But the boys …’

Freya gave her aunt a quick hug to stem the tide of how Steve, David and Brian could vacuum up meals at Olympian speeds.

‘Have to go, Aunt Opal. I know, the boys ate everything you put in front of them and still do. Don’t worry, I won’t starve. I made lunch last night. I’ve got to race in.’

‘Don’t forget to brush your hair, pet,’ Opal called after her niece.

As she swung out of the kitchen, Freya caught a quick glance of herself in the old mirror in the narrow hall. Dark eyes and the same long slim nose as her mother. Wild dark hair that reached to her shoulders and probably would have hung halfway down her back if it had ever gone straight in its life. She ran her fingers through it quickly. Brushing only made it worse. The top button of her shirt was open and the knot of her tie was too low. Someone in school would give out to her about it, but she’d deal with that when she got there. Freya didn’t worry too much about being given out to. There were certain people in life who felt their day was lacking something if they hadn’t remonstrated with at least four people. The vice-principal, Mr McArthur, who hovered perpetually just inside the main door of the school, was one of them. Freya was used to it now. She didn’t mind. Words didn’t really matter. Actions were what counted. And people like Opal.

‘See you this evening, Opal. This is my late day at school, don’t forget,’ she roared as she shut the door behind her.

The house was bang in the middle of a terrace of tall, skinny red-brick homes and to make up for the postage-stamp-sized patch of garden at the back, there was quite a sliver of front garden.

Opal had worked her magic there too. Pink was her favourite colour.

‘I’ve loved pink ever since I was a girl,’ Opal admitted bashfully to Freya when she’d moved in.

It had been summer then and despite how shell-shocked Freya had felt after the six months that had followed her father’s death, she’d noticed that her aunt’s garden was a riot of every shade of pink. From the palest roses tinged with sun-blush to outrageous gladioli with their vivid crimson flowers. There was no grass, only a scatter of gravel amongst which grew a selection of herbs and alpines. There were a few varieties of sedum here and there, busily colonizing entire areas, creeping towards the roses like marauding drunks at a party. The rose bushes were Opal’s pride and joy. This early in the year there were only tiny green shoots on the stems. During the winter months the colour in the garden came from the many varieties of shrubs that Opal and Ned had collected over the years. There were laurels, glamorous plants with dark green glossy leaves and heathers with golden fronds. When the boys had lived at home, Opal told her, they’d been heavily involved in the garden. Freya was pretty sure this wasn’t because they loved gardening but because they loved their mum. When she said, ‘Will someone go out and take the weeds from between the gravel,’ the boys would groan good-naturedly and do it. Now of course they lived two streets away in a three-bedroom rented townhouse that couldn’t hope to contain all their mess. Opal would go over once a week and get them to tidy it up and Freya kept trying to persuade her that this was a terrible mistake.

‘Aunt Opal,’ she would say (Freya only called Opal
Aunt
when she was remonstrating with her), ‘Aunt Opal, you are not doing the boys any favours. They need to learn to organize themselves. How else will they develop into clever wonderful men who will make marvellous husbands?’

‘Well, Brian’s going to make a marvellous husband already,’ Opal would insist. Brian was getting married at Easter to Elizabeth, a primary school teacher. ‘And you know what Steve’s like, God love him. He’s hopeless with the washing machine.’ Given that Steve was a computer programmer, Freya felt this was a particularly feeble excuse.

David was the most dutiful when it came to tidying up. The sensible, soft-hearted and handsome one who had inherited the best qualities of both his parents, David knew how to use the vacuum cleaner, knew that the same dishcloth could not be used for three weeks running and understood that toilets occasionally needed to have bleach poured down them. Freya couldn’t help smiling when she thought of David. Her best friend, Kaz, had a long-range crush on David because he reminded her of the guy who played the lead in
Australia
, and would go puce whenever David said hello to her.

‘He is
so
like Hugh Jackman, I wish he’d notice me,’ Kaz would wail.

‘You are many years too young for him, that’s why he doesn’t notice you,’ Freya would explain. ‘It would be like a first year fancying you.’

‘Eurgh,’ Kaz said. ‘Point taken.’

With a last fond glance back at the house with its shining turquoise front door, Freya swung out the gate. Ned had put his foot down when it came to painting the exterior woodwork. ‘I had to,’ he’d told Freya. ‘I mean, the whole place would be pink if I’d let her. Imagine the lads …’ His voice had trailed off into a shudder at the thought of his three big strong sons coming home to a pink palace. ‘At least turquoise can be sort of manly.’

Thanks to Opal, Freya knew everyone on the street. On one side was Molly, who liked to drop in every day on the hunt for sugar, a drop of milk, or the newspaper, because there was a nice article she’d heard about and wanted to read. Aunt Opal always said that if a day went past when Molly didn’t drop in for something, the world wouldn’t feel right.

On the other side was shy, sixty-something Luke, a widower who had vowed he would never remarry after his beloved wife had died.

‘Not that it stops some of the ladies on the road from dropping in with cakes and pies and things,’ Opal would say. ‘Poor Luke, he really does want to be on his own.’

‘Why don’t all the women realize that?’ asked Freya.

‘Some women think it’s unnatural for a man to live by himself,’ Opal said sagely. ‘They’re waiting for him to see he needs someone else. He’s such a dear, they’re all determined to be the one.’

Next to the beleaguered Luke’s house lived the Hiltons, a young couple who had managed to produce four small children in three years. Their garden – unlike Luke’s, which was tended by his lady admirers – was a disaster zone of overturned trikes, weeds taller than the children and a dead tree in a pot outside the front door where Annie Hilton had desperately tried to inject some beauty into the front of the house only to forget to water the damn thing. Freya had babysat the children a couple of times and she could understand why the tree was dead. Watering a tree had to come very far down Annie Hilton’s list of daily chores.

The terrace curved as it got towards the main road and Freya looked in, as she always did, at the house where Meredith’s one-time best friend Grainne lived. Meredith was the only one of the cousins Freya didn’t see regularly. In fact, Meredith was something of a mystery to her. And Freya didn’t care for mysteries.

Meredith was the eldest; she’d moved away from Redstone as soon as she left school, and hardly ever returned. Oh, she’d show up for a big event like Uncle Ned’s sixtieth birthday party, but Freya couldn’t quite get a handle on Meredith. She seemed to have distanced herself from her family and Freya, who adored Opal and Ned and her three cousins, simply couldn’t understand it. Why would anyone blessed with such a wonderful family turn their back on it?

And the Byrnes weren’t the only people that Meredith had turned her back on. Since her divorce, Grainne was back living at home with her parents, along with Teagan, her sweet four-year-old daughter. Freya always said hello to Grainne and Teagan if she bumped into them on her way home from school. Although she was thirty-something, the same age as Meredith, Grainne looked about seventeen. She was always smiling as she walked down the road holding the back of Teagan’s pink bike as the child wobbled along on her stabilizers.